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Nick Kolakowski has written for The Washington Post, Slashdot, eWeek, McSweeney's, Thrillist, WebMD, Trader Monthly, and other venues. He's also the author of "A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps," a noir thriller.

In a bid to repel boarders—so to speak—the BitTorrent Website The Pirate Bay is apparently moving to the cloud.

“Now we’ve gotten rid of the servers. Slowly and steadily we are getting rid of our earthly form and ascending into the next stage, the cloud,” read a note posted on the Website’s blog. “Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours.”

As a result, the posting continued, “All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing.”

In a subsequent conversation with the Website TorrentFreak, representatives from The Pirate Bay said they’d opted for cloud hosts in two countries, with data backed up on a number of virtual machine (VM) instances.

This introduces a certain amount of redundancy into the equation: if a cloud provider decides to take down The Pirate Bay’s account, the latter can purchase virtual servers from another cloud host and “upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer to get the site up and running again,” the representatives told TorrentFreak. The Pirate Bay owns and operates said load balancer and transit-routers, allowing it to cloak the cloud providers’ location and keep its users’ privacy intact.

The Sweden-based Pirate Bay hosts millions of torrents and boasts millions of registered users. That visibility made it a magnet for copyright regulators attempting to shut down instances of illegal sharing: in 2006, for example, police raided The Pirate Bay’s Internet provider and seized servers running the Website. “The film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal website down,” the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wrote in a statement at the time.

While that was arguably The Pirate Bay’s most high-profile collision with the outside world, it wasn’t the only one. In 2009, for example, Facebook blocked members from sharing Pirate Bay links. Because it was blocking emails based on content (as opposed to, say, security or identity concerns), the social network found itself roundly criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.